


The Idle King

by manic_intent



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), James Bond (Movies), James Bond - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Christmas prompts, M/M, That AU where Silva lives, because James doesn't get to make the Scotland decision
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-16
Updated: 2017-12-16
Packaged: 2019-02-15 12:29:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13031172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/manic_intent/pseuds/manic_intent
Summary: “You tried to kill me with atrain,” James said, when he sat down beside Silva at the outdoor bar, a glass and steel confection hidden behind waxy palms and a strata of fans that did little against the humid tropical heat.“That?” Silva scoffed. “That wasn’t me trying to kill you. That was a statement. If I’d really wanted to kill you, darling, you wouldn’t be here. Drink? Martini, was it? Shaken, not stirred? You do know that ruins the drink.”James rolled his eyes. “I’ll have what he’s having,” James told the barkeeper, who nodded, turning to pick a bottle off the shelf. “Japanese whiskey? Really.”





	The Idle King

**Author's Note:**

  * For [leftofrevolution](https://archiveofourown.org/users/leftofrevolution/gifts).



> Prompt by leftofrevolution: 00S: There were better animal analogies than rats. 
> 
> I rewatched Skyfall on the plane for a refresher. Damn, I’ve forgotten how beautiful this film is. The plot is a bit ??? at times, especially on a rewatch, but I love this film. I love the Q scene in the museum, the cinematography. Javier is awesome. And I miss Julie Dench so much q_q

Divergence

“So your great plan to kill Silva is to drive us both off to some godforsaken place in Scotland where we won’t have backup of any sort, far away from any medical aid, to a house which has already been sold and likely stripped, and stage some sort of last stand?” M asked, pursing her lips.

“Get in the car, _please_ ,” James said, gritting his teeth. 

“That’s an appalling plan. I’m amazed you’re still alive, to be honest. How on earth did you live to get this old?”

“Not to mention your most successful agent.” 

“Yes, don’t remind me. If ever there was a indicator of how much I’ve failed as M that would have been it.” 

James fought the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose. “So do _you_ have a better plan?” 

“I always have a plan. Which doesn’t involve, by the way, running off to Scotland with my tail between my legs. Q? The other 00s. Call all of them back to London. Now.” 

“Yes’m,” Q said into their ears, sounding a little relieved. Traitor.

“ _All_ of them,” James repeated, distastefully. 

“Yes, yes. You’re all terribly spoiled children to a hair, and none of you have ever worked very well as a pack. But the pack is what I need now, and it’s what I’m going to get.” M rattled off an address as she got into the car. “CIA safehouse. Off the books, postwar. So he doesn’t know about that, I hope. Drive me there.”

Now

“You tried to kill me with a _train_ ,” James said, when he sat down beside Silva at the outdoor bar, a glass and steel confection hidden behind waxy palms and a strata of fans that did little against the humid tropical heat.

“That?” Silva scoffed. “That wasn’t me trying to kill you. That was a statement. If I’d really wanted to kill you, darling, you wouldn’t be here. Drink? Martini, was it? Shaken, not stirred? You do know that ruins the drink.” 

James rolled his eyes. “I’ll have what he’s having,” James told the barkeeper, who nodded, turning to pick a bottle off the shelf. “Japanese whiskey? Really.” 

“Pssh. Philistine. Your Scottish roots are showing.” Silva watched as the barkeeper poured James a finger of amber. “Yamazaki, aged eighteen years. My personal favourite.”

“Not a fifty year Macallan?”

“Oh, that was more your style. A bit of a statement. Flashy, expensive, and yet no real indicator of taste.” Silva smiled as they touched glasses. Despite the stifling heat, Silva was in a sleek pale blue suit with a black shirt dotted with a goldfish pattern, of all things, cuffs caught at tanned wrists with pale cylinder cufflinks. “Dinosaur bone,” Silva said, following James’ glance, “from a tyrannosaurus rex’s tooth.” 

“A gigantic carrion eater. Fitting.”

“Oh, you know your dinosaurs.” Silva ran a pink tongue over his mouth, the laughter in his eyes, as always, infected with hyena madness, bright and feral and furious. Carrion-eater. “Albeit not very well. T.rex was both hunter _and_ scavenger.”

“And you like your… colonial history,” James said, making a show of looking around doubtfully. The Raffles Hotel in Singapore had been given a new coat of paint, a grand old lady in white and slate, sandwiched between fingers of glass, a step back to a time of empire. 

Silva chuckled. “Empires are messy things. They grow and grow, and must eat more and more things to grow, exchanging more and more misery for more and more wealth, until eventually they eat something they cannot swallow, and _pffth!_ The end.” 

“A better analogy for you than rats.” 

“For us,” Silva corrected. “So are you here for business or pleasure, James?” 

Hands loose on the table, feet pressed to the bars of his stool instead of the ground. Not visibly armed, though with the cut of that suit, it was hard to tell for certain. “I’m not sure yet,” James said. 

“I’m disappointed that She called off the hunt.” 

“ _Someone_ decided to play dead.” 

“Yes, well. You get used to it. Being afflicted with life, that is. Getting chased up and down London by all you new pets got a little boring after a while.”

“After we got to all of _your_ pets, hm?” Together, bickering and squabbling all the way, and technically without jurisdiction to operate in London, MI6’s 00 team had cleaned out Silva’s surprisingly large private army of hired mercenaries and routed him from the city. Shanti had even come close to shooting Silva in the back. 

“By the way, it’s a travesty that you’re M’s favourite. That young Indian lady is very good. Much better than you, in fact. She’d probably have killed me if you hadn’t gotten in the way.” 

“005, yes.” She’d blamed James for the missed shot, and now, three months on, was still refusing to speak to James save where absolutely necessary. Shanti always took things terribly personally. Rather like the rest of the 00s, James supposed. Even Silva. “And I didn’t ‘get in the way’, I was there first.” An ill-fated grappling match with Silva had led to Silva plunging into the Thames, suitably dramatically. He hadn’t surfaced, not that anyone thought he had actually died, but London had grown quiet since. “M retired, by the by.”

“Why yes. Nice quiet little place in Sussex. She’ll go stir crazy within the year and move back to London, if I know her.” 

James made a noncommittal sound. The 00s had taken turns staking out M’s cottage, up until she’d lost her temper and chased them off. “I’m no longer M, for God’s sake,” she’d told them. “Get back to work!” 

“She had to resign in disgrace,” James said. Three months ago he would have killed Silva just for that. Now, he wasn’t so sure. M—the old M—didn’t seem so much resigned to her fate now as strangely indifferent to it. “You let her live.” 

“I think it’s clear to the both of us now that we don’t _let_ Mummy do anything. We’re all still puppets. You, me, all the 00s, the ISC. Everyone. She got she wanted. The merry chase I led all of you across London got the Ministers to put through new legislation granting MI6 expanded powers under the new M. New budget, new mandate, new digs. Everything She wanted and more, when not so long ago she’d been up before the committee, having to sing to keep MI6 afloat. She even got a new cottage out of it. Everyone won. Except me.”

“You should get into the habit of blaming yourself for your own mistakes. It builds character.” James pushed over the box he was carrying. “She said this was for you.” 

James had looked into it already, of course, several times on the long flight down to Singapore, so he watched Silva’s face instead as Silva lifted the black lid of the box. It was a dinky, cheap little thing, a common sight in many Asian restaurants: a gilt lucky cat with an upraised paw and a red belly. This one had changeable paws: the left could be raised, or the right, but not both at once.

Silva’s face froze as he lifted out the cat with gentle fingers. He changed the upraised paw from right to left, and looked at the scratched base, where the gold was flaking off. Then he set the lucky cat back into the box. “Sentiment,” Silva said. The hyena humour had gone out of him, leaving only an unpleasant stillness that James recognised. He’d seen it in the other 00s. He’d seen it in his mirror. 

“A message,” James prompted, curious. 

“Oh yes.” Silva replaced the lid on the box. “A piece of the past. She didn’t have to send you as a delivery boy. You’re a little overqualified.” 

“I volunteered.”

“Retire or die, hm?” 

“You’d have a harder time dropping a train on me here,” James said lightly, and reached over to drink Silva’s whiskey, holding his eyes evenly as he did so. When he drained it, Silva smiled, tight and rueful.

“Not your first time, you said.”

“Not at all.”

“You volunteered to be the sweetener?” Silva laughed. It was a sound with an animal coughing edge, a hunting-sound, or a warning. 

“For Queen and country,” James said, though he smirked to give his words bite, and touched Silva’s knee under the steel counter. Silva stared at him, going still again, studying James’ own relaxed hands, his posture, his feet. Then he smiled, beckoning, picking up the box.

#

Silva had booked one of the East India rooms, which showed that Q probably hadn’t yet come close to ferreting out all of Silva’s expense accounts. The elegant suite was another snapshot in time, to a period when England had ruled the seas and much of the known world, laying waste to some of it and remaking the rest in their image. James found colonial reminders depressing. Perhaps Silva knew. It was hard to believe that all this wasn’t in itself a statement of some sort. Another analogy, perhaps. Silva trailed his fingertips over the rosewood back of the antique divan, his smile coy, setting the box down on a side table.

“James,” he said, tasting the sound in the air, spoken without a lover’s knowing caress, but with bite of his own, with a tender sort of hatred. 

“Raoul,” James replied, with pointed irony, and Silva shook his head, baring his teeth, though he stayed where he was as James came closer, closer again. The kiss was flavoured with whiskey and malice both, and James was careful to lick against the plastic yield of Silva’s mouth, to press his tongue against the hinge in the lower jaw, the broken teeth, the scarred roof of his mouth. Not a kiss. Another statement. Silva’s hands ran down James’ hips to his arse, kneading, hauling them flush. 

“Not that name,” Silva whispered, the words compressed against James’ mouth. He’d lost the right to his real name, James wanted to tell him, lost everything that should have mattered to him; it was fitting that he had chosen a new name that had stuck, one that he had evidently grown to despise. 

“Tiago,” James said instead, and Silva chuckled and coughed, hyena sounds that trailed them through the museum of empire to the bedroom, a cavernous space dominated by an antique four poster bed. 

“Awful,” Silva said, and kissed James on his throat, nudging down over where his pulse was strongest when James merely tipped up his chin. 

“Traditional.” 

“Trite.”

“Empire.” 

“Ooh, I love this game. Word association, wasn’t it? MI6’s cute little nod to psychology and procedure. Don’t feel bad about failing _that_ test. Every 00 fails.” Silva nipped James’ jaw lightly. “After all, we’ve been eating other rats for most of our professional lives. We’ve changed our natures, and those tests are for the sheep.” 

“You and your rats,” James said, walking Silva to the bed. They kissed, quietening Silva’s hyena humour, if only for now.

“This is a felony in this country,” Silva said, as he pulled James down onto the sheets, grinning, unbuttoning James’ crisp white shirt. “Unnatural acts, I believe they call it.” 

“What a shame.” James peeled the suit jacket off Silva, tossing it to a side, and bent to kiss when Silva tutted in disapproval. They kicked off shoes and tugged off belts, stripping down with an uneven urgency. James had worked out cufflinks and was unbuttoning Silva’s shirt as Silva ripped buttons and bit James’ shoulder, hard enough to draw blood, spotting James’ white shirt. James didn’t flinch. The hyena deserved his due. 

“Oh James,” Silva purred, when he’d managed James’ trousers and underwear and found the secret between James’ legs, pressed snug. “I’m very flattered, but old wounds and chronic pain have certain… quelling side-effects, shall we say. Even with the pills.” Silva’s cock was soft against James’ thigh, though his eyes were hungry. 

“That’s what the toy is for. Surely this isn’t _your_ first time,” James said, and Silva slowly bared his teeth, fingers tenderly pressing against the flared base of the wedged toy before shoving it deeper. James growled, bracing himself against the bed. He resisted instinctively when Silva pushed at his shoulder, then collected himself and rolled obligingly onto his back. Silva looked him over, his eyes lingering on old scars with a lover’s possessiveness. Then he set one gun-roughened palm over James’ heart and slipped the other back between James’ thighs.

James arched at the first thrust of the toy inside him, then he spread his thighs and bared his throat as Silva began to play, grazing James’ throat with his teeth as he twisted the toy until James flinched and bit out a gasp. “Here we are,” Silva murmured, and his free hand slipped up to curl around James’ throat. James stared back up at him evenly, curling his hands into the bed to keep them still as Silva slowly began to squeeze, his eyes hyena-bright.

Carrion-eater, making more carrion, perhaps. Hunting. James couldn’t tell, looking into maddened eyes, and in truth, he couldn’t quite care either. Silva wasn’t the only one at loose ends because of the previous M’s retirement. It hadn’t been fair. The Great Game they had played all of their lives had lost the only dealer they had known, and nothing was the same. James struggled for breath, lightheaded, pleasure tangling against his trained instincts. 

Knee Silva in the stomach, or better, in the groin, heel of the palm in his throat, twist free, return the favour. Or spread his thighs wider and moan, wheeze and gasp and beg for air. Losing breath, James imagined himself doing both, somehow. Striking back without losing pleasure. Conquering death, man’s final empire of one. His vision was starting to go, his body out of his control now, twisting in fits and starts. The toy was shoved deep, hands closing roughly around his cock. Then James was gulping for air, curling onto his flank, pleasure boiling over. Still shuddering, James looked up, just as Silva tossed the toy over the side of the bed and began to lick his soiled fingers clean. 

“I know what you need,” Silva said, poisonous as ever, smiling now as he kissed James’ cheek, then the reddened marks he had left on James’ throat. 

James nodded, weary. He knew that too. 

“It’s why you’re here. It’s why She gave you that box. It’s here to infect us both with sentiment.” 

“Probably.” 

“You see. We can’t escape Her strings. That’s why I did what I did. To be free.” 

James didn’t bother to answer. Silva stared at him for a moment more, going still. Then he got off the bed, padding towards the bathroom. James heard plastic clink into glass, and Silva returned, his face unframed, skin pulling down past his eyes and ruined mouth. Still James said nothing, even as Silva settled against him on the bed. Up close, the damage was worse, somehow. Silva had once been a cruelly handsome man. Now, he was just cruel.

“Ugly, yes.” Silva said, his smile now made ghoulish. “A monster.”

“That’s not what makes you a monster,” James told him, and turned to curl against Silva’s flank, yawning. Eventually, Silva skated fingers through James’ hair, then down his throat, fingertips going still over his spine.

**Author's Note:**

> Twitter: manic_intent  
> Tumblr: manic-intent.tumblr.com  
> —  
> Title from a line of the poem that M quotes, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses  
> https://www.primermagazine.com/2017/learn/stirred-not-shaken-myth-busting-the-martini  
> http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/07/16/time-to-slay-the-t-rex-scavenger-debate/


End file.
